There are many situations wherein it is desired to produce diagnostic image information with respect to a subject by means of any of a variety of electronic apparatuses, and for then making the results of these diagnostic tests promptly available to a person who is not present at the diagnosis site. This is especially true in the medical diagnosis of patients; prompt communication of diagnostic test results to a remote physician is not only often important for the physical well-being of the patient, but also shortens the stay of the patient in the hospital. This results in substantial economies of cost to the hospital, especially in view of the present economic system under which hospitals now typically operate, including for example the DRG and pre-admission certification systems.
In the past, one form of apparatus for providing such diagnostic image information has typically produced a photographic film record which is analyzed at a diagnostic station by an expert who prepares a diagnostic report, typically in written form, after which the film record and report are manually stored. The physician concerned may then go to the diagnostic station, have the films and reports retrieved and collated, and review them while there or, in some cases the materials may be mailed or otherwise delivered to him; both of these procedures are obviously very time-consuming. The report may instead be transmitted orally to the remote physician by telephone, in which case he does not have the benefit of viewing the visual diagnostic images himself, and a human operator is necessary to relay the report orally. In each of the above cases, which rely upon a written diagnosis and a photographic film, the basic analog information storage structures must be kept in files manually maintained for this purpose, for slow manual retrieval and collation when desired.
It would also be possible to provide an optical scanner or video camera at the diagnostic center, where the film record and typewritten commentary could be optically scanned or televised and the digitized results transmitted in binary digital form over telephone lines to a suitable computer and display screen at the physician's location. Such an arrangement would still require manual retrieval, collation and presentation of the film and written commentary to the optical scanning device or television camera, and is therefore again relatively slow and expensive; in addition, the use of a film record and subsequent televising or optical scanning of it generally results in substantial degradation of the quality of the diagnostic image transmitted to the remote physician.
At present, sophisticated diagnostic imaging techniques not only can provide a film record of the diagnostic image as described above, but can also produce and store a digitized reproduction of the film, so that the digitized image may be displayed at will, at the patient-testing site or remotely. As mentioned above, this approach is time-consuming and inherently inserts electrical noise into the resultant image, thus subjecting it to analog distortions.
It is also possible to derive from the digital storage files of the manufacturer's equipment a digitized version of the diagnostic image and transmit it to a remote station where it may be decoded by a D/A converter and the decoded information supplied to a cathode-ray tube display. Such a procedure has been found to be uneconomical, awkward and inaccurate for many applications. The manufacturers of such diagnostic equipment typically change the format of their respective digitized image files at will, which typically renders any previously-installed decoding system inoperative; a substantial and expensive effort is then required to analyze the new storage format, and to devise and install a new decoding system. Furthermore, the manufacturer's diagnostic equipment typically performs additional processing of the stored image-representing data after it is accessed and before it is displayed, so that transmitting the unprocessed stored digital data to the remote viewing site often results in a remote reproduced image substantially different from the image derived and displayed by the manufacturer's equipment at the subject-testing site.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a new and useful system and method for transmitting to a remote site diagnostic image information generated by an imaging modality at a subject-testing site.
Another object is to provide such a system and method which are capable of providing diagnostic image information to a physician at a remote site accurately and promptly, by means of apparatus which is easy to use yet inexpensive to construct, install, operate and maintain.
A further object is to provide such a system and method which remain operative despite changes in the data storage format in the imaging modality.
Still another object is to provide such a system and method which are capable of accessing image information from any of a plurality of different types of modalities in different formats, and for supplying such image information electronically to one or more remote display stations in a selected appropriate format.